Anyone use or work at a school that uses "Success For A

Take this for what you think it’s worth, though it’s not much. I don’t use Success for All and haven’t even seen if before, but some of the larger cities with lower test scores in our state (CT), such as Hartford, are using it. The results have not been all that was desired, and from what I’ve read in the newspapers many teachers don’t like it because it stifles creativity. The one benefit seems to be if your town/city has a student population that is very transient; supposedly everyone in the district is supposed to be on a certain lesson on a certain day, so students who move frequently won’t be loosing much material (at least that’s the idea, I think). Sorry I can’t be much more help.

Jenn

Some of my colleagues call this “Success for Some”

BUT that doesn’t say it all - As usual things are more complex. Success for All does NOT have a great track record. Some of their techniques are questionable… for example repeating sounds in a fashion that sounds like a stutter. I also do not agree with their placement techniques, which leave a struggling student lower than their actual level in an attempt to fill in all the gaps.

HOWEVER - the idea of putting children in leveled group across several grade levels has some merit in my mind. It is what I did as a resource specialist (RSP, mostly SLD kids) to meet common needs. A potential difficulty is that disabled readers need to be in small, very small groups.

Good luck.

When this has come up in places like the librarians’ email list, I get the strong feeling that it’s a good program that got mangled on the way from development to implementation. They talked about things like teachers and librarians being forced to get the training and implement it — sorry, that just *isn’t* the way to make teaching work, no matter how good the program *could* be.
All you need is not enough resources, teachers who feel like they’re forced into something, and decision makers who don’t really know what goes on in the real world… you can make any progrma look bad.
Of course, it could be a lousy program, too…

I agree that the idea of placing the students where they are at for instruction sounds really good.

The big issues that concern me are how do the students and parents feel about the groupling as our school is smaller with only one classroom for each grade, and since all the lessons involve cooperative learning how does that work out?
It sounds like each group within the leveled groups are given points for doing this and that appropriately based on how they work cooperatively. Each group would strive to get the most points. Does the focus go off of learning and teaching reading and on to getting and keeping track of points for working cooperatively?

Also, the sp ed students are placed at their level. Can they make gains using this program?

Thanks a bunch for the feedback so far.

The trouble is that “placing kids at their level” often sounds better than it really is. Sounds like you are adapting the curriculum to the child, when, in fact, at times you are placing them “where they are failing”.

For example, if a 6th grader is reading at the 3rd grade level (or so it says) sounds like it makes sense to place them at a 3rd grade instructional level, right? Well they might have severe problems in decoding at an even more simple level and problems with PA. They may only be reading at a 3rd grade level due to good visual memory for sight words, use of context cues, and some very basic sounding out fo the first sound. By not taking them MUCH farther back, you are doing them a disservice. In fact, many of the kids I work with are like this, and not the exception. I can’t speak of “Success for All” as I don’t know the program specifically, just the concept of “placing kids at their level” *MAY* not be all its cracked up to be.

—des

I agree entirely with des. When I am tutoring and somebody gives me a grade level, I expect the student’s actual skills to be quite a bit lower; my most extreme case had passed into Grade 4, marks of B and C, with a pre-primer reading level of fifty words and those not accurate — but he was really great at reading people and telling you what you want to hear. Other kids may not have quite so extreme a gap, but they are almost always using coping skills to cover a lack of reading skills; in order to improve the reading you have to first stop the coping, step back to get a base to go forward.

“Cooperative learning” was a disaster for my daughter. She was a quiet, reserved, bookish little thing, and the random groupings required by the system placed her with a bunch of juvenile delinquents (literally; the police were at the school every day.) The test based on group work marked her as failing in reading, a huge joke for a kid who read much better than the teachers in that place — luckily we knew enough to laugh at the test rather than upsetting her with it. Later on she learned to do group work in the engineering robotics class where she actually had common interests with her classmates, but that is a different issue. Generally I am very suspicious of enforced group work.

I taught Success For All for four years and can think of little good to say about it. I transferred to another school because I could not continue to use something that was so inappropriate for my students (first grade). As a special ed teacher I was assigned mixed groups of regular and special ed students. The pacing is predetermined and monitored daily. I could not slow down when needed and was forced to watch my special kids fall behind.

The facilitator is in and out of classes during the reading block, making sure everyone is doing exactly what they are told to at that time. (You do this activity for 5 minutes, the next for 10, etc. The first year we were expected to use timers to stay on schedule, but we all refused to continue that.)

When the Success for All people who came to visit the schools, were asked questions about the problems we were having with some special ed kids, they had no answer (and we were soundly reprimanded later by our principal for asking).

Their highly touted tutoring is also scripted and there is no leeway to use teacher judgement about the needs of the child. You have to work on the lesson that is being taught in class, even if the child is significantly below that level.

Perhaps it has improved in the past four years, but I would resign rather than use it again.

I was wondering how the special ed kids were supposed to fit into this program. Now I see.

<<The results have not been all that was desired, and from what I’ve read in the newspapers many teachers don’t like it because it stifles creativity.>>

From what I understand, only the primary sections of the program have any type of phonics attached to it. Therefore, if there is an intermediate age student who has difficulty with phonological sequencing or had never been taught using a phonics approach, that student is dead in the water. He can only go down to the first level of the intermediate grade in the program. If he doesn’t succeed in the 8-wk. period, he repeats it until he passes the test.

A student needs to know how to decode in order to be successful in this program. If there are no opportunities for our LD students to learn word attack skills, they will fail in this program.

Perhaps, Response to Intervention will be a major factor in turning this problem around for all students who require supplementary and/or alternate reading programs.

Marilyn

As to the creativity point, I think that it really applies more to regular ed. where they force all regular ed teachers (however experienced) to do one a scripted program (such as Corrective Reading). Where I have less of a problem with it is in special ed. We know that special ed teachers are really NOT trained (for the most part) in working with reading. So, to me, I say that it is more desirable to get the reading done appropriately (if it is done appropriately), and worry about the creativity later. BTW, I have used a VERY scripted program, Barton. As I become experienced with it, I see how to tweak it to the individual student.

—des

And you don’t have to be scripted all day. I did SRA (but in sped setting) - once the guys got the rhythm down, we were done in less than a class period so we did readalouds … it really motivated them to do things smoothly ‘cause the quicker we got through it, the more they got to hear about the story of the day (not what you’d necessarily expect from worldly seventh and ninth graders…)